Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Arkansas, Indian Territory, and Kansas, 1863–1865 235
force and I will fight you on your own grounds. But if you persist in the system
of Guerrilla warfare heretofore followed by you and refuse to fight openly like
soldiers fighting for a cause I shall feel bound to treat you as thieves and robbers
who lurk in secret places fighting only defenceless people and wholly unworthy
[of] the fate due to chivalrous soldiers engaged in honourable warfare, and shall
take any means within my power to rid the country of your murderous gang. 15
On 18 May, just one week after Williams issued his challenge, a party of guerrillas
surprised a foraging party made up of forty-five men from the regiment and a white
artillery battery near Baxter Springs. The Confederates claimed to have chased the
federals for about eight miles, capturing five wagons and their six-mule teams. The
foraging party lost 16 killed, all from the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, and 5 prisoners,
2 from the infantry and 3 from the artillery. Later that day, the guerrilla leader Thomas
R. Livingston exchanged the artillerymen for three of his own men who had fallen
into Union hands. What happened next became the subject of assertion and evasion.
Livingston reported: “The prisoners I have subsequently exchanged for Confederate
soldiers.” The federals alleged that he “refused to exchange the colored prisoners in his
possession, and gave as his excuse that he should hold them subject to the orders of the
rebel War Department.” (Livingston’s relation to the Confederate government is unclear.
He signed his report, “Major, Commanding Confederate forces.” A Union officer
called his followers “bushwhackers.”) Colonel Williams arrived on the scene and “for
the first time beheld the horrible evidence of the demoniac spirit of these rebel fiends in
their treatment of our dead and wounded. Men were found with their brains beaten out
with clubs, and the bloody weapons left by their sides, and their bodies most horribly
mutilated.” When Williams heard a report that the Confederates had murdered one of
the prisoners, he shot one of the Confederate prisoners he held and the next day burned
the town of Sherwood and eleven farms within a few miles of it. According to Livingston,
the federals “put 10 of their dead (negroes) that had been left on the battle-ground
the day preceding, . . . together with the body of Mr. John Bishop, a citizen prisoner,
whom they had murdered, into [one of the houses], and burned the premises.” The war
of allegations and atrocities was well under way on the western border. 16
During the week that followed, Livingston and Williams exchanged letters about
the fate of the remaining prisoners on either side. Regimental letter books usually recorded
only correspondence sent by the commanding officer or adjutant; but Williams
must have thought the exchange with Livingston was so interesting that he ordered it
copied into the record, so that the Confederate’s messages and Williams’ replies alternate.
(The accuracy of transcription is open to question, for Livingston’s first letter
was semiliterate; his grammar and spelling improved markedly in the last two.) On 20
May, Livingston announced that he was willing to exchange his white Union prisoners
for Williams’ captured Confederates, but that “as for the Negrows I cannot Reccognise
15 OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 1, pp. 320, 322 (“Colonel Williams’”); Lt Col J. M. Williams “To
Comdg officer of Southern forces in Jasper & Newton Counties Mo,” 11 May 1863, 79th USCI,
Regimental Books, RG 94, NA.
16 OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 1, pp. 219 (“bushwhackers”), 322 (“The prisoners,” “Major”); Military
History of Kansas Regiments, pp. 409–10 (“refused to exchange,” “for the first time”); Official Army
Register of the Volunteer Force of the United States Army, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Adjutant
General’s Office, 1867), 8: 256 (hereafter cited as ORVF).